Generating and Activating Sitemap for Enhanced DSpace SEO Performance

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages of your DSpace, helping search engines understand its structure. Sitemaps ensures that search engines are aware of all your content, leading to more comprehensive indexing.

Sitemaps allow DSpace to expose its content in a way that makes it easily accessible to search engine like google, bing and yahoo.

How to Generate and Activate Sitemap in DSpace

As of DSpace 7, sitemaps are enabled by default, and automatically updated on a daily basis so, there's nothing you need to do. For DSpace 6.x and below sitemaps are disabled and must be configured.

Once you've enabled your sitemaps, they will be accessible at the following URLs:

HTML Sitemaps

your_dspace_url/sitemap_index.html

XML Sitemaps

your_dspace_url/sitemap_index.xml

So, for example, if your DSpace URL address is = "https://ir.oauife.edu.ng" then the HTML and XML Sitemaps would be at: http://ir.oauife.edu.ng/sitemap_index.html and http://ir.oauife.edu.ng/sitemap_index.xml respectively.

Example of other sitemaps:

- University of Lagos DSpace Repository Sitemap: https://ir.unilag.edu.ng/sitemap_index.html

- National Education Repository and Digitalbank Sitemap: https://nerd.ethesis.ng/sitemap_index.html

- WORLD BANK Open Knowledge DSpace Sitemap: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/sitemap_index.html

Generating Sitemaps

If you wanted to generate your sitemaps manually, you can use a command line tool to do so.

Rund this command from DSpace 7 REST (backend)

[dspace]/bin/dspace generate-sitemaps

where [dspace] is your DSpace REST API (backend) installation directory.

WARNING: Keep in mind, you do NOT need to run these command line in DSpace 7, as sitemaps are autogenerated and autoupdated on a regular basis.

Conclusion

By following these steps and submitting your sitemap, you ensure that Google, yahoo and Bing are aware of the structure of your DSpace and can efficiently crawl and index its content, ultimately improving your visibility in search results.

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